- a kind of virtual social intelligence, a reaching out on Group Dynamics and Human Processes at the Workplace ( http://www.workplacecatalysts.com ) .
- Foster a discretionary Presence in Groups, to enable human capability.
For my online news report read or subscribe to http://paper.li/jgblr

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Between Neutral Anxiety and Positive Anxiety? How do you Innovate for Awesomeness?

When it comes to Innovation, would you be cautiously
optimistic for fear of slipping into academic fundamentalism? Did you not pay
homage to the fundamentals during your education years?

I was on this cusp of reflecting the Monday 8 July, 2013
meeting of the CII Innovation forum. That is when a lucid, evocative and utilitarian
perspective came in from Intuit’s Vijay Anand. Embedding emotional appeal
within Lean process improvements has largely eluded the Indian IT services
businesses, despite the rich opportunity potential to fill that experience
economy market. Is it because Intuit is a product company that it has been
relentlessly innovative for almost 30 years?

Well, this is not an advertorial for Intuit, but a stimulus
from which I hold out a premise that may appear as symptoms of competitive
myopia in service businesses. The Tofflerian Third Wave was to be about service
economy proliferation or penetration with knowledge flows and momentous
delights. What could be the deterrents that prevent providing customers with
positive emotional experiences throughout the customer relationship journey?

Intuit’s example provides simple check-points, like the
following:

1.Do you deliver customer benefit?

2.Do customers use your product / service for the
benefit you claim to provide?

3.Do customers recommend your brand proactively?

Delightful service or awesome client experiences could
materialise if

1.The customer experiences benefits that he or she
‘cares’ about

2.The customer accomplishes his organisational or
personal need with ease or reduced effort. Your offering will work with other
stuff your client lives with.

4.The customer is able to justify his or her
delight in your offering in advocating your capability, not just his or her
intelligent investment in you

Sounds simple, and even reads ordinarily possible. However,
the capacity to identify the benefit your customer cares about begins with your
own emotional bandwidth. What latent need of the customer would you have discovered during the
prospecting phase? How do you nudge your client to value your offering without breaking
rapport?

Tough one, admittedly for engineers from India to design to a
vision that provide you the Love Marks of the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Visualising
the Customer’s benefit is also about addressing the riskiest assumption of your
capability to serve your client. Innovation is the process where your leap of
faith on this assumption will be the one on which you are willing to stretch
your known capability. That is where you get leads into what the client is also
willing to risk on in terms of behavior to meet your value in discovery mode.

A critical fallacy in this paradigm could be equating customer ‘advocacy’
with a commodity that has a shelf-life in terms of inventory and scale.

Advocacy that arises from authentic customer delight is a
value realization episode. The value is however impermanent.

In itself, the
sentiment of advocacy has potential of perennial nature. Suspending the
accretion of value could however, cast shadow over perceptions of your service capability.
We all know how emotionally draining a service recovery could become. We also know, how desirous feelings of delight are.

In closing, as adult learner, I tie my observations with a knot to an idiom the illustrious Shombit Sengutpta led his firm with - Emotionality trumps Functionality, perhaps even Rationality! So, how would we render Authenticity? If you do not experience authenticity in the bonds between your own team workers, what chance does your customer stand of experiencing awesome service? Let me know.